Developer-driven software distribution is a bad idea, which is why I dislike things like Flatpak.

Having distro maintainers involved in the process and installing your software from a free software distribution like Debian or FreeBSD is a much better distribution of power. The packages can be tuned to suit their environment without the developer having to repackage it for every distro, and the distro maintainers can keep out anti-features like telemetry and advertising.

The middleman may seem annoying to developers, but embrace the model and it'll work for you. Landing packages in your favorite distro isn't actually that hard, and the rest of the distros will follow. If you're an end-user who wants to see some software available for your distro, look into packaging and volunteer - it's easy.

@sir One of the major features of Flatpak is using container technology to make sure no matter the distro, the package is running in the same environment as the developer's machine, so there is no need to "tune for the environment."
For the anti-feature point, if you have problems with the source, you should fork it, not pretend you are distributing the app while in reality you are distributing something else.

@cagatayy @sir Hate to bang the Guix/Nix pan all the time (no i don't) but what you want is reproducable packages/environments, not containers.

@grainloom @cagatayy nix people are like the homeless guy on the street corner ranting about the clinton administration in 2019

@sir @cagatayy Well, it's a much more usable rolling release distro than any other I've tried. Guix, that is. Nix's tools could be better.
And its developers aren't elitists who joke about mentally ill homeless people.
Call me when another distro gets an equivalent of `guix environment`.

@grainloom @cagatayy oh, shove off, it was a joke. NixOS is for FP elitists, that's why I don't like it. It's way too complicated for way too little gain. I'll take 90% the stability for 10% the complexity any day of the week.

@sir @cagatayy NixOS maybe, but Guix is not that complicated, nor are its developers or users FP elitists. But even Nix solved some very real problems that establishes package managers of the time failed to address.

@grainloom @cagatayy only true if you accept the "problems" it solves as such

@sir @cagatayy As someone who had pacman fuck up their bootloader due to a power outage, I welcomed anything that makes updates atomic. And being able to have conflicting versions of packages is also nice.

@grainloom @cagatayy I agree on the first point, but not the second.

@sir @cagatayy It also makes parametric packages easy to work with. And the functional purity means you can provide binary caches for package variants. Undeclared dependencies not affecting build output is quite useful.

@grainloom @cagatayy I am familiar with these package managers, and I stand by considering these things antifeatures

@sir @cagatayy
Ah well. I think most people will like them.